Monday, August 9, 2010

Leave the Gun, Take the Canolis

It has been a tough few months at the foundation. We have grant and funding requests out there and some we are still waiting to hear from. One extremely large corporation promised us a grant, cut it by an eighth, told us the "check was in the mail" and it never came. Neither did any responses to our inquiries as to the whereabouts of said check. Yet, today, they are funding a large organization's outing... this large organization has more money than God and continues to tell women to wait until 40 to get a baseline mammo. A stellar recommendation that has lead to more advanced cases of breast cancer than any other. And because they are so big, insurance companies use them as their basis to refuse a young women screening because "they said not until after 40."

Our request for funding was to promote our Before Forty Initiative. The initiative that is working every day to let young women know that waiting until forty could mean the difference between life and death. How do we know? Because we are survivors. We have seen our sisters die because they did not get early screening and subsequent early detection and died because of it. We are trying to spread our outreach to college campuses, health clubs, social networking sites, anywhere young women will see our message:

Get that early screening. Learn about Triple Negative Breast Cancer and your risk for it if you are African American.

But, no. This Corporation basically lied to us and is funding a golf outing for the Big Dog, instead.

Competition among breast cancer charities is quite common. When push comes to shove, the Big Dogs win the money. And those of us on the front lines, who are actually making a difference, continue to fight for real people, with real problems, and life and death choices in their care.

If you care about the lives of women who don't even know they have breast cancer yet and want to get them screened so they can find their cancer before it is too big to survive it, support the Before Forty Initiative. Just click on the Donate Now button on this page or on the Foundation's website page.

We may be small, but we are scrappy. And because we are actual breast cancer survivors, we don't give up and we keep on fighting. Hell, we're not called No Surrender for nothing, you know.

Tomorrow, maybe we'll start to name names. Nothing personal of course, just business.

2 comments:

cancer has different stages and need to know to take care, especially when the disease progresses rapidly and is difficult to control, that is why it is recommended that an annual exam to rule out any disease. The health care today must be much more comprehensive and preventive.

Gina, I find that I'm wanting to write yet another post about this subject. The big guns give me heartburn. You work so hard & I know myself I'd much rather support smaller local and more practical types of groups that directly help women. Sigh....

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